Sunday, December 14, 2008

Electoral College Votes Monday

Electoral College Votes Monday

You think you voted for president Nov. 4? You didn't vote for president at all.

Technically, you voted for a slate of electors. The Electoral College meets Monday in Des Moines and 50 other campuses. Quick Electoral College 101: Each state gets as many votes as U.S. representatives, plus two for the senators. These votes are not just tally marks; they're 538 real people, including seven Iowa Democrats, who will cast the only real presidential ballots. If recent history is a guide, there's about a 50-50 chance that someone won't vote the way they're expected to.

This year is already guaranteed to have one quirk. For the first time in almost a century, a state elected a slate of electors that's split by party. Maine and Nebraska choose electors by congressional district (the other 48 states and D.C. are winner-take-all), but this year for the first time that's more than just theoretical. Barack Obama won the Omaha-based Nebraska 2nd District, while John McCain carried the other two districts and the state. (Look for the Nebraska legislature, officially nonpartisan but Republican-dominated, to change that law soon.)

Several states have split their votes in recent years, but that's the human factor rather than election law. "Faithless electors" sometimes vote for someone other than the party nominee. Many states have passed laws prohibiting electors from voting other than the way they're pledged, but Iowa has not. Those laws haven't been constitutionally tested yet, and no faithless elector's vote has ever been overturned.

Faithless electors usually make a big deal out of their protest votes:

the Virginia Republican who voted Libertarian in 1972;

the Washington state elector who balloted for Ronald Reagan in 1976;

the West Virginia elector who flipped the ticket in 1988, choosing Lloyd Bentsen for president and Michael Dukakis for VP; and

the Washington, D.C. elector who abstained in 2000 to protest the District's lack of voting Congressional representation.

But no one stepped forward to own up in Minnesota in 2004, when one elector voted for John Edwards for both president and vice president. The consensus was that someone simply screwed up their ballot.

The last state that actually elected a split slate of electors from two parties was California in 1912. Back then, voters in some states cast ballots for each individual elector, and California was so close that the top two Woodrow Wilson electors did better than the bottom two on Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose slate. That happened a few times in the 19th century, but as the practice of voting on each elector declined, those outcomes disappeared.

Alabama split its votes in 1960, but that was due to the nature of its Democratic elector slate. Six electors were segregationists who wound up voting for conservative Democrat Harry Byrd, and five were national party Kennedy loyalists. But the entire Democratic slate of electors won. (Alabama was one of the last states to vote for each elector. The Kennedy loyalists ran a few thousand votes behind the segregationists, but well ahead of the Republicans.)

The segregation era produced more than its share of weird electoral college results: faithless electors in 1948, 1956, 1960 and 1968, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace's strategy of trying to throw elections into the House of Representatives in `48 and `68, Mississippi's winning slate of unpledged electors inf 1960, and incumbent presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson being kept off the ballot in Alabama.

Of course, the inherent flaw of the electoral college reared its head in 2000. Leave the discussion of hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Ralph Nader aside; no matter what the Florida scenario, Al Gore won more popular votes.

2000 took electoral college reform off the table through the Bush years because it became a partisan issue. To amend the Constitution, you need a consensus-level supermajority: two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states. Once an issue becomes partisan, like the Equal Rights Amendment did in the late `70s, it drops below that supermajority. Arguing against the Electoral College drew attention to Bush's popular vote loss in 2000, and thus it became a partisan matter.

In recent years, a few states have tried to do an end-around on the constitutional amendment process by passing the National Popular Vote plan. States that pass the plan agree to cast all the state's electoral votes for the national popular vote winner, but the plan only takes effect when 270 electoral votes worth of states pass it. So far, four states with 50 electoral votes (Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey) have passed the plan. Iowa City state Sen. Joe Bolkcom introduced the plan in the last legislative session.

In Iowa, candidates for elector are nominated at state party conventions: one from each congressional district and two at the state level. Invariably, during conventions, these people are referred to as "electors," which is wrong because you're not an elector until your candidate carries the state. You're a "candidate for elector."

There are no absentee ballots in the electoral college. Mid-December ice storms have kept electors away and people have been replaced at the last second, which seems kind of a cavalier way to treat a constitutional responsibility.

So, with the outcome certain, what will we see Monday? Did a stealth Ron Paul supporter sneak onto an elector slate somewhere? Will a die-hard PUMA cast the ultimate protest vote for Hillary Clinton? Will some Republican with nothing to lose cast a vote for their 2012 favorite? And will Americans ever decide that it's time to just vote directly for president?

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule enacted by 48 states, under which all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.

Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections.

In the past six decades, there have been six presidential elections in which a shift of a relatively small number of votes in one or two states would have elected (and, of course, in 2000, did elect) a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote nationwide.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

Every vote would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections.

The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

The bill is currently endorsed by 1,181 state legislators — 439 sponsors (in 47 states) and an additional 742 legislators who have cast recorded votes in favor of the bill.

The National Popular Vote bill has passed 22 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes — 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.

There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that needs to be changed in order to have a national popular vote for President. The winner-take-all rule (awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes inside the state) is not in the U.S. Constitution. It is strictly a matter of state law. The winner-take-all rule was not the choice of the Founding Fathers, as indicated by the fact that the winner-take-all rule was used by only 3 states in the nation's first presidential election in 1789. The fact that Maine and Nebraska currently award electoral votes by congressional district is another reminder that the Constitution left the matter of awarding electoral votes to the states. All the U.S. Constitution says is "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors." The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the states over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive." A federal constitutional amendment is not needed to change state laws.

There have been 22,000 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 10 have been cast for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector's own political party. The electors are dedicated party activists who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.